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Dr. Meredith Kline, Prologue, Lecture 33
© 2012, Dr. Meredith Kline and Ted Hildebrandt
Parental Authority
It is under his parental authority. This was Isaac or Jacob and so on right down the line then the whole teaching in Romans that if the root is holy then the branches are holy. So that’s my understanding of it. There are no problems with it that I can see. So it is infants are born into the holy covenant community by this sign (circumcision). It’s simply because they are under our parental authority and my general thought is that the main question is simply when God organizes the family of the covenant, the family of Jesus, does he or does he not honor the natural family and authority structure which he has set up? So the Lord has set up the natural authority of parents over children, now does he bypass that ignore it or does he honor it and incorporate it in the constituency of this covenant family? As I see it, the consistent climate of biblical testimony from beginning to end that he honors that family authority and that is precisely the basis for baptizing infants. And an assumption of election or regeneration is simply not what is going on there.
Grace, works and the law
Student Question: Can we apply the same categories from the Old Covenant and the typological categories, the covenant of works and election in the same way to the church?
Kline’s response: No, absolutely not. We are in a different age. That is a distinctive age characteristic precisely of that second layer of the Mosaic economy. If you wanted the characteristic of the of the Old Covenant then you want to identify the whole covenant with that second layer. No, that belongs to that but, of course, circumcision wasn’t just initiated in connection with that but was initiated with Abraham before that. So you might say that the New Testament continuity then you could trace back in terms of being an age of grace rather than an age of works back to its patriarchal origins. So circumcision gets taken up into the other arrangement here. As such then, it takes on the particular meaning the curse it symbolizes, takes on a particular meaning of the curse that is going to overtake corporate Israel. That is a specialized function that it performs in that context but in itself before that, and after that it is pointing to a more general judgment of God. The nature of the New Covenant order then is not of works but that of grace and so on.
Student question:
Kline’s response: Salvation, the offer for that matter of election is not on the basis of foreseen works.
Student Question: But still life in the kingdom in the church today we recognize that for us to live peacefully with one another we have to live out certain doctrines and we have to live out and live according to the law.
Kline’s response: What does that mean? Do you mean that we are under a works principle? Just explain how you are using “law,” as works and inheritance or whether you are using it as a standard of conduct.
Student question: the standard of conduct.
Kline’s response: That’s another question all together.
Student question:
Kline’s response: What is necessary is to truly be in the Kingdom of God. and to experience his blessings of justification and peace with God and fellowship with the saints. What was necessary. Is it by faith alone? Or were the reformers wrong? It was by faith. I’m sure you would agree by faith alone. So whatever you want to say about works after that just say something that is consistent with the fact that it is by faith alone. Then there is the question of law as standards of conduct which is a separate question … that’s a completely separate issue. This is an important one we want to keep straight on is this. We are in the kingdom and blessed by faith alone and whatever works are still demanded of us function in some other way especially by validating faith alone.
Student Question: Is there any connection between the standard of conduct idea and the covenant of works that God made with Israel? Because they were not working towards the experience of the kingdom of God, that was still by grace.
Kline’s response: That’s at the bottom level, remember we keep talking about the covenant of grace and so far as you’re talking about individuals getting to heaven. From the fall to consummation it is one way by faith alone. That’s true under the Old Covenant as well. When the old problem comes up with this peculiar other dimension that comes into the picture with the Mosaic covenant, namely national election with typological kingdom. That is where works are functioning, that’s where the works principles is functioning.
Now standards of behavior are the same throughout. The function of the obedience is different however. The function of obedience at this level is attesting to the validity of the faith whereby they get to heaven. The function of obedience of corporal Israel at this level was actually the meritorious crown of hanging onto the blessings. So the continuity in the New Covenant is with this bottom line. It’s in discontinuity with that. Therefore Paul says, this is not of faith, the law was not of faith. He’s not talking about the bottom line obviously he’s talking about the top line. There is a difference in the operative principle with the meritorious ground. Faith alone here, it was the obedience of Israel functioning at a different level. That’s the question of the function. There are always the standards, there are always the demands. There are always the commandments for the good works. The question is what is the function of the good works.
So the function of Adam’s good works would be that’s the meritorious ground of his moving on to the eschatological blessings. The function of Jesus in eternity was that of the meritorious ground of his receiving the blessings which then he was the mediator of the covenant bestowed on us by grace. The function of Israel’s obedience was like Adam’s and Jesus’. It was the meritorious ground of hanging onto at least the typological version of the eschatological blessings. So works obedience functions in one way in a works arrangement and functions all together differently in a grace arrangement. That’s the whole problem to distinguish these things.
The Promises of the Abrahamic Covenant
Now we will move on. I think we will want to keep moving here to do at least some of these last things that I wanted to do together in our last evening folks. The next one that we deal with is the promises of the Abrahamic covenants. So we had dealt with the Abrahamic covenant in so far as who belongs to it and by a study of circumcision. Now, of course, there are other aspects of it. Now here again is this covenant of grace. It has had its earlier particular covenantal expressions especially in the covenant with Noah and the ark. Before that there was the covenant line of Seth, and after that, the covenant line of Shem leading up to Abraham. Now leading up to Abraham we have this covenant that gives shape and color to all the rest of redemptive history.
It is as we have just been suggesting a covenant of promise, it was a covenant of grace, it was not in itself a covenant of works. Paul makes a strong contrast between these. He speaks about the law coming those four centuries later as one that did not annul the promise. So that in itself shows that he saw that the law was different than the promise. Therefore he had to raise the question of whether being different it didn’t annul it. Then, of course, he says, it didn’t annul. Our question is how come it didn’t annul it? If law is the opposite of promise and comes later, how does it not obliterate the promise? I submit to you the only way you can answer that is if you do what I’m doing and recognize that the law was functioning up here. Down here it is in terms of individual salvation. The same thing was going on under the Mosaic period and under the Abrahamic promise namely, the principle of promise. So even though the law came in later and was different it has been annulled because there was not any application within this peculiar area up here.
Now then this particular period does however represent stage number one in the fulfillment of the Abrahamic promises. The Abrahamic covenant as a covenant of promise is saying that it is an arrangement of faith and grace and spirit as over and against works. Now we are asking about the specific promises. By grace God is to bestow the kingdom. Ultimately here is the kingdom, the Sabbath kingdom, the kingdom of heaven which will be realized in the coming of Christ in two stages A and B for that matter. So we look then at these Abrahamic promises and what we discover is that there is indeed the promise of the ultimate kingdom but also involved in it is the promise of an earlier stage. So in our covenantal understanding of the thing, the book of Genesis, as we say, is the kingdom prologue. During the whole patriarchal age of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob the kingdom hasn’t come yet, not even in stage one.
God comes to Abraham and he promises him a kingdom and a kingdom we will try to break down into the ideas of the king, the people and the land. Those components make up the kingdom. That kingdom hadn’t come in any sense yet within Genesis 12-50--the time of Abrahamic covenant.
With the coming of Moses we come to a fulfillment of those kingdom promises. But it is only a provisional not the perfect thing. It’s only a passing fulfillment, it’s not permanent one. It’s only a typological fulfillment, not the real thing, not the antitype. It’s only a restatement of the promise really. It’s not the fulfillment but it is stage number 1--the typological fulfillment.
Therefore this hermeneutical approach, I’m using the word “type” or “typological” or “covenantal” because it understands the nature of this Mosaic economy as precisely having that provisional shadowy typological function. But that’s not the ultimate fulfillment as we said from the outset. What God was promising was the ultimate kingdom. So there’s continuity in between them. So we can keep the chalk on the board while we’re doing this. There is no big break in this particular plan.
Now you come to the New Covenant and here you get the perfect, not the provisional, the permanent not the transient or passing. You get the antitype not just the type. Here you get the fulfillment not just a symbolic restatement of the promise again. However it unfolds in two stages related to the first coming of our Lord and the second coming of our Lord. Now that’s the way in which we will be interpreting these promises which we will then be running through and looking at the biblical evidence in some detail as time allows.
Description of dispensationalism
What we will be opposing to this and being critical of is the dispensationalist approach which is a non-typological hermeneutic. They don’t understand the relationship between the Old and New covenant as having that type/antitype promise/fulfillment continuity between them. What is characteristic of at least and especially of the oldest Schofield Bible, which is the classical dispensation position, is to inject a discontinuity between what we would regard as the two levels of fulfillment. They wouldn’t like two levels of fulfillment at all because they don’t see any connection. In fact, they repudiate the connection between the two. The church, they allege, is not in the Old Covenant at all.
So classical dispensationalism then posits: so here you have the Abrahamic covenant and here you have a fulfillment in Moses--the Old Covenant which then gets interrupted at the point where as we have seen there is a failure to recognize the Lord of the vineyard’s son. They have rejected the prophets and now they reject the son. So there is a break in the continuity of that arrangement. Nevertheless, it isn’t that it is only passing and transient and now obsolete, as we would say, but it is something that was intended to be really permanent. It’s not that this was the Old Covenant and replaced by the New Covenant. It’s just the older covenant and the New Covenant was a newer one but the older one hasn’t been replaced. The old one isn’t obsolete on the back burner for a while and new deal is on the front burner. But this church deal will be taken off the front burner and when the older covenant will be put back on the front burner.
Meanwhile then we do take the chalk off the board here. We come to a turning point which very precisely they want to identify as the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. They would expound this thing in terms of their misinterpretation of the the seventy weeks passage in Daniel 9:24-27. They would say that the first 69 weeks of the 70 weeks ends at the triumphal entry. Then the prophetic clock stops ticking, according to them, and we have this parenthesis which is now the church but that is discontinuous with the church. The church is somehow projected into the picture which had not been spoken of in the Old Covenant before that. The church will fulfill its vision in the world not as that which fulfills this but as something that sort of runs parallel to it and might have some analogies. That is the word they would use instead of typology. We see typology and this is the antitype and that’s the type. All dispensationalists would allow for some sort of similarities with certain analogies between the two but it’s not the same program. It’s a parenthesis. It’s something else going on which will be removed from the world in terms of what they conceive of as a secret rapture and followed then by the 70th week of Daniel as they understand it at that point culminating in a resumption of the old order, or the older covenant and millennium experience.
In a millennial experience which resumes the features of the old order including land, temple and so on. At the end of the millennium then you have the question of whether the church which has been raptured out of the world and is experiencing something elsewhere and whether the experience of whoever is up there ultimately melds and blends the experience of Jewish community down here or whether forever they contend the same. But that was the classical pre-mill scene.